Enemy: invading
by Wordsmith 17
Summary: The story of the xcom squad Trips, Odin, Whiskey, Tombstone, Hardcore and Omega as they fight the aliens every step of the way to victory.
1. And so it begins

Aliens. That elusive word that everyone knows but is so mysterious. So many possibilities. Paul, ET, Mars Attacks. The media industry made a fortune with that one word. So it was ironic that the first thing the aliens blew up when they arrived was a TV station.

Arnold McGee emerged from the restroom of the BBC building in Cologne, Germany. He took a long swig from his mug of coffee. After a lengthy conversation with his secretary, he watched the newest program being made. Then, a slight rumble shook the building. "What was that?" He asked, taking his mobile out of his pocket. He called the guard on the roof. "What's happening up there?" "Aaagh! Godgodohgodno! Please..." Well, that explained a lot. He turned, only to run into the form of... something. It raised a glowy green thing, and he died.

The next two attacks were met with military retaliation on a massive scale. Every single time, the aliens were only repelled at the cost of hundreds of lives. We needed a way to beat them. So we made one. A last stand, an international paramilitary organization. And it was called XCOM. The Xtraterrestrial Command Overseas Mission. A long name, but all it really was was 2000 personnel and $20,000 worth of fuck off. Using cutting edge technology, we made armour and weapons worth a damn. To the aliens, we were the first real obstacle they'd had. XCOM squads stopped abductions and attacks everywhere. And humanity took a stand. -Commander Bradford, XCOM hq.

Emilio "Odin" Riviera hauled himself out of bed. "Squad Alpha to skyranger bay seven. Squad Alpha to..."  
"Shut up!" He screamed. Running to the hangar, he met up with the other members of his squad. Wolf, Kobayashi, Thompson, Jackson and Phillips. They put their gear together, enjoying their companionship. Grenades were checked and double-checked, assault rifles, LMGs and that bloody ridiculous shotgun Wolf insisted on using readied and loaded. Squad Bravo was in the cargo bay too, and Sgt Kirill "Thunder" Zinchenko was checking his LMG. The two groups stood in conversation for a while, checking their gear. Then squad Alpha turned and walked to the Skyranger.

The Skyranger hovered over the drop site in Zimbabwe. Contact had been lost an hour ago, and Meld readings were positive. Meld readings identified a trace element that the scientists believed to be responsible for the genetic modification on all aliens discovered thus far. It was the one thing all the aliens had in common. "Odin." The voice brought him back to the present. "Earth to Odin. We've landed."  
"Okay. Secure ten, ready one and then cover."

The mission was quite easy to start with. The Sectoids moved fast, but accurate gunfire splattered green blood on the sandy road. Moving fast, they entered a warehouse at the end of a road.

Odin ducked into cover behind some crates, ignoring the blood trickling into his eye from a gash on his forehead. The Sectoids had come out of nowhere, faster than before. They had killed Wolf and Jackson before the squad could react, and Thompson was on the ground screaming and clutching at the stump where his leg should have been. Odin and Phillips took cover near the forklifts, and Kobayashi was by the door. Bullets and alien blasts flew back and forth. Odin let fly, taking the head off a Sectoid. Phillips went down, dead,but the aliens were taking casualties as well. Only two remained. One was destroyed by a headshot, and the last one took aim at Odin. It fired, but Kobayashi hurled herself in front of him. "No!" He screamed, and emptied his rifle into it. He ran to Kobayashi. The shot had drilled through her armour, and her vital organs were soup. She would probably be dead in ten seconds. "Odin..." she struggled to say, "...I'm sorry. Tell Vahlen...TX=...37. Make this war end." And she died.

Thompson survived, but he would be unfit for active duty forever. Odin told doctor Vahlen that TX=37, and she suddenly straightened up. "Yes. Yes! I could do that!" "What is it, doc?" "Come with me."

She lead him through a corridor, and they came through into a room. Lab technicians scurried around, surrounding a suit in the centre. The suit was massive. On one arm was a flamethrower, and the other held a rocket launcher. "Holy crap." Said Odin. "Indeed." Said Vahlen. "This is the mark one M.C.E, or emcee. Until now, we could not get it to work. We now realise that the pilot has to be modified."  
"Modified?" She turned to him. "Emilio, you are our best soldier. With the formula, we can develop augmentations that will allow you to pilot this. But after the operation, you will be unable to go back. Your limbs will be replaced with titanium alloy prosthetics, wired into your nervous system with Meld. You will, effectively, cease to be human to become more." Emilio thought for a second, about Wolf and Kobayashi and all the other people who had been killed in this war. He remembered Kobayashi's last words. "When can I start?"

Emilio pulled his eyes open. He felt different. Pushing the covers off his bed, he gasped. "Okay," he said, "That's new." He tried flexing his new titanium limbs, to find that they worked perfectly. He tried standing up. Reaching his drawers, he opened them. So far, so good. He pulled on a pair of boxers and a shirt, and then reached his trousers on the other side of the room. Now. He had a grudge, a jumbo iron man suit, and some metal arms. He grinned.

The M.C.E stood in the centre of the room. Its minigun stood in a corner. Emilio clenched his fist. It clenched its fist. Emilio spoke into the radio. "Engage." And he flew.

The dropship, a modified Skyranger, flew over the crash site. A regular Skyranger flew alongside, holding Odin's new squad. Omega, the sniper, the two assaults, Tombstone and Trips, and the medic, Whiskey, were sitting in the back. XCOM interceptors had brought down a small UFO near the Canadian border, and the techies had thought it the perfect opportunity to test the emcee. A TV crew was ready to come in and film the site for a propaganda vid. One of the new camera drones was ready to take a shot of Odin landing. He deployed. Odin fell through the air, his M.C.E cushioning the landing. His minigun dropped afterwards, and he caught it. The Skyranger landed behind him. His squad moved out behind him. "Right," he said, "Let's go get this stuff."

A Sectoid peered over the top of a hill. Odin's sensors picked it up, and it died. Visual contact on the UFO. But something was happening. Outside the UFO was a golden glow, and Odin scanned it more closely. "Form up. Tombstone, Trips, flank the target." As he got closer to the glow, he saw a humanoid figure composed, according to his sensors, of pure energy. "The hell..." he heard Omega over the squad commlink. "Shut down that comm chatter." Raising his minigun, he strode forwards. The figure did not acknowledge him. As soon as he was within two feet, however, it's head snapped around and it rugby tackled him, pushing him bodily through the wall of the ship. Drawing back his arm, he punched it in the face. Then he activated his rocket launcher, and blew its head off. What was left folded in on itself and vanished in a puff of unlight. The others ran in through the outer energy field. "Well," said Omega, "The beers are on me."

Commander Bradford stood in front of the council. "We are displeased with your progress, commander. Two squads have been decimated in the past month. The XCOM project is no longer viable." "With all due respect sir, I disagree. My men are capable of fighting aliens." "We understand that. But the XCOM project is not economically viable. The orbital defense project could work." "You want to build a wall round our planet. A WALL. I do not get how that works. Sooner or later, an alien ship will come along and turn it to mush."  
"Your men are being turned to mush already, commander." "We have a new advantage." "Oh, what now? Armour? Weapons?" He grinned. "Both." And he played the video.


	2. We've found their base Go wreck it

_Hi guys! So, if anyone has any complaints about plot, getting such awesome gear early in the game, etc., please don't hesitate to keep your mouth shut._

Over the next few weeks, Odin and his squad became the go-to squad for any mission that needed special attention. They destroyed around two hundred aliens between them, without losing a single soldier. Using an arc thrower, a specialised piece of kit which let them stun aliens, they brought in a thin man and a Sectoid for interrogation. Eventually, using tech salvaged from aliens, they built laser weapons that could almost match alien light plasma rifles. Odin got some upgrades too, using a powerful railgun on his emcee. They upgraded their armour too, using alien alloys recovered from crash sites. The biggest upgrade, however, was the use of Meld. Using it, they edited their genome and became superhuman. Trips, like Odin, chose the raw power of an MCE, configured for close combat. And all the while, they fought the aliens.

Tombstone dragged herself out of bed in tune with an alert. "Tombstone to mission control. Tombstone to..." she drew her pistol from the holster on her desk, and put a round into the speaker. "Mission control that."

"So basically, a friend of a council member who has been opposing us for a while is in very deep shitteroony. Go help him. Take your Deity armour." She nodded off the closest she could come to a smart salute without coffee, and walked away.

Ernesto "Hardcore" Guzman racked the slide on his shotgun and blasted another alien that was nearing his position. He only had ten shots left, which was unfortunate. His pistol was good for another fifty, but these things usually took at least two shots to kill. So thirty five kills he could still get if he aimed properly. Then, something strange happened. A thin man nearing his position seemed to take flight. It landed with a crunch near him, and then red beams flew through the air. Thin men were struck and blasted into cars or debris. He fired as well, and soon the aliens were all dead. His saviour revealed herself, and he gasped. She was absolutely beautiful. Red hair, tied back into a ponytail for convenience, shone slightly despite the mud and grime caught in it. Her armour was a flat white colour, unlike anything he had ever seen before. It hugged her body closely, displaying her perfect hourglass shape. Shrewd eyes almost glowed blue in the darkness. Her weapons were also unusual, with glowing red ammo clips and short, blocky designs. Her helmet flipped back into place. "I'm Tombstone, XCOM elite operative. A sitrep could help. I've been ordered to rescue one Ellis Jonson." "Ellis went and rigged some explosives to stop the enemy crossing that bridge. They never went off." "Ok. Head to the dropship over there, and wait for me. Grab some weapons." As she walked off, she called out. "Oh, and welcome to the real war soldier!" "Ernesto is my name, so don't call me soldier!"

Tombstone landed with Ellis slung over her shoulder like a toy. "Go go go go go!" Already, enemy units were advancing up the small pile of debris. She laid down disciplined firepower against enemy targets, but Chrysalids were hard to kill. She retreated back towards the Skyranger. She made it on board, and they took off. The dropship circled round, and its nose mounted heavy laser killed the rest. In the back, Tombstone was explaining the Deity armour to Hardcore. "It's a prototype, and uses several systems from aliens we've encountered. For example, it can fly. It can also turn invisible, absorb a lot of damage, and link to my gene mods and relay info on their performance back to base." "Gene mods?" "Augmentation using Meld to enhance the human genome. I can take a hit from a plasma rifle and stay standing, move like the wind, and hit like an anti tank grenade. You'll get some yourself once you join up." Then the Skyranger landed.

They were greeted by possibly the strangest bunch Ernesto had ever met. Tombstone introduced them as the rest of her squad, and him as a new recruit. Codename Hardcore. Then they took him down to what was only called the Meld Chamber. Then they plugged some tubes into his back, using minor anaesthetic to stop him passing out from the pain. Tombstone was standing by a button panel. "Get ready. This will hurt like a bitch." And, with an apologetic grimace, she pressed the button. Daggers of pain stabbed everywhere that existed in his body, and his muscles and skeleton felt like they were being hacked apart with cleavers and sewn back together with cord and a drawing pin. Then, suddenly, it stopped. Arms held him, strange arms, and lowered him onto a table. He saw something descending, and then he slept.

Hardcore burst through the barrier between him and consciousness. He was Ernesto Guzman, codename Hardcore. Time of birth twenty-one seventeen hours. Twenty-second of March 1955. What? What was going on? "Ernesto." A voice pierced his fog of thoughts and memories. "Ernesto, can you here me? ERNESTO. Wake up you lazy bugger. It's Tombstone. You know, Gretta Halvorsten. Up and at' em, sunshine. Aliens ain't gonna wait." He groggily pulled himself to his feet. "Hey. So what's happening to me?" "Your memories are all flooding back to you. Total recall is tough, but the eidetic memory comes in handy." A voice chimed in from speakers around the place. "Hardcore gene mods holding steady. Subdermal plating at one hundred percent. Eyesight mod coming online. Secondary heart is beating. Stem cells at two thousand percent functionality. Immune system at three hundred percent and oxygen capacity increased. Welcome, Sergeant Guzman." He grinned. Being more than human was going pretty well so far.

Hardcore was assigned to Tombstone's squad, and soon he got his first proper taste of combat. The six of them were sitting in the back of the Skyranger, on their way to an alien ship that Raven Five had put down in Mexico. Trips, true to form, had programmed the holoprojector in his helmet to make him look like a guy in a sombrero. Some things never changed. An M.C.E in a sombrero. Hardcore had been issued with an arc thrower, a belt of frag grenades, a few medikits, a scatter laser and a laser pistol. He flexed his hand, enjoying the sheer power he knew he could now bring to bear. Odin was still hanging off an emcee transporter. Tombstone was sitting on one of the seats, still beautiful. He was going to have to ask her out some time. Whiskey was downing a hip flask of his namesake, Trips was on the transport next to the Skyranger. Omega was checking his sniper rifle again. The dropship landed with a bump, and they moved.

Most of the UFO was cleared with little difficulty, their weapons and armour more than sufficient against the pistol fire of the Sectoids. Tombstone and Hardcore approached an energy screen. Tombstone opened it, and Hardcore ran through. As he neared the flight computer, the Outsider materialized almost on top of him. It smashed his gun away into the darkness, and his pistol too. It grabbed him, and threw him away. He hit a wall, and fell down. As it advanced, he saw his arc thrower lying a few feet away. Quickly, he grabbed it and pressed the trigger. A bolt of energy struck the outsider and it folded in on itself. A shimmering crystal was left in its place. They secured it, and headed back to base.

 _Is that a base assault mission I see? HELL YEAH!_


End file.
